MindStore

MindStore is a course run by Jack Black. There's also a book, and cassettes/CDs that you get on the course, or can be bought separately. The CDs are OK in their own right, the book is less so IMO.

I was sent on it by the company I worked on as an experiment. When they got the feedback on the course, they stopped sending people on it. It wasn't that it was bad, just a bit... strange ;-)

It was somewhere between way-cool and way-weird. Jack Black seems to believe in just about every wacky idea you can imagine; food combining, that poisons placed behind you make you instantly weak, that you can intuitively guess the colour of a car that is coming the other way before you see it... and on.

Yup, he's a major wacko. A fun wacko however, very personable and a good speaker; and he was very positive.

Anyway, the course was very relaxing. It basically consisted of Jack Black hypnotising (he said it wasn't hypnosis, but I had read a book on hypnosis, and trust me, it was hypnosis) the whole class for two days.

It wasn't like a stage hypnotist, he used the hypnotism to install visualisation techniques in the class, that are supposed to help you to learn things faster, to throw away your alarm clock, to set goals, to relax.

The mental alarm clock. Basically the idea is that before you go to sleep you visualise the current time on a clock, and then move the hands to when you need to wake up. Then you go to sleep. At the right time you will wake up; even if you've moved the clock into another room, and have no way to check the time during the night. I tried it, it worked. Way-cool.

Other techniques he taught were less effective, the learning technique he taught seemed to work poorly, mnemonic techniques are far better, but the relaxation techniques worked great.

Overall, the course was a mixture of excellent parts (the mental alarm clock, and the relaxation techniques) and very average parts (the memory techniques). The planning and goal setting techniques were OK/good.

But the course was the most relaxing course I have ever been on; I wafted out of there totally bone deep limp. As a stress relieving course it took top marks.